- A modular django user.
I am not going to discuss if this is a good idea or not. This Django application monkey patches django in order to have a custom User model that plugs into the django.contrib.auth
application.
First of all install the module by checking out the latest code or use pip:
pip install django-primate
In order to monkey patch we need to do this early. I have created a small modified manage.py
file that you can use for your development. This sets up your environment and right before you run your management command (such as runserver
) we apply the patch. Copy this into your project and overwrite the default manage.py
:
#!/usr/bin/env python
from django.core.management import setup_environ, ManagementUtility
import imp
try:
imp.find_module('settings') # Assumed to be in the same directory.
except ImportError:
import sys
sys.stderr.write(
"Error: Can't find the file 'settings.py' in the directory "
"containing %r. It appears you've customized things.\nYou'll have to "
"run django-admin.py, passing it your settings module.\n" % __file__
)
sys.exit(1)
import settings
if __name__ == "__main__":
setup_environ(settings)
import primate
primate.patch()
ManagementUtility().execute()
To monkey patch your deployment you would apply the patch right after setting up the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE
.
Now add django.contrib.auth
to your INSTALLED_APPS
After installing this patch you effectively have no User model at all. You have to create one on your own and define it in your settings. I will give you an example on how to do this using the provided UserBase
class.
project/users/models.py
:
from primate.models import UserBase, UserMeta
from django.db import models
class CustomUser(UserBase):
__metaclass__ = UserMeta
name = models.CharField(max_length=500, default='Jon Deg')
title = models.CharField(max_length=20, blank=True)
settings.py
:
``AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'users.models.CustomUser'``
Now you can import this model by from django.contrib.auth.models import User
or from project.users.models import CustomUser
It's simple
- To add a field just add a field to the model as you would normally.
- To override a field just override the field name and it will be used instead of the one defined in
UserBase
.
The overriding feature is something special not available in normal Django model abstract classes and is done in the custom metaclass. You can also remove fields defined in the UserBase
class by altering the metaclass a little, you can have a look in the code, its a really simple.
To make the admin work I have made the monkey patch primate.patch
patch the admin.autodiscover
so that it does not register the default admin class for django.contrib.auth.User
. This means that you will need to register that your self. The easiest way to do that is to first add users
to your INSTALLED_APPS
and then add something like this to users/admin.py
:
from primate.admin import UserAdminBase
from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
class UserAdmin(UserAdminBase):
pass
admin.site.register(User, UserAdmin)
I have made some minor changes:
- Removed
first_name
andlast_name
- Added
name
username
is now max 50 chars- Made
email
unique get_profile
method just returns self
As stated earlier, you can now change all this, remove add and override fields in your user model.
I was worried, this is a major feature, luckily Andrew already thought of this: quote from the documentation under SOUTH_MIGRATION_MODULES
:
"Note that the keys in this dictionary are ‘app labels’, not the full paths to apps; for example, were I to provide a migrations directory for django.contrib.auth, I'd want to use auth as the key here."
So the time has come, just add this to your settings:
SOUTH_MIGRATION_MODULES = {
'auth': 'users.migrations',
}
SHA-1 is the default django hashing algorithm for passwords. Some may not agree that this is the best choice. django-primate
makes it simple for you to use alternative hashing as you can just override the check_password
and set_password
methods in your custom user model. Since bcrypt is a good choice there is a simple way for you to implement hashing using this:
# project/users/models.py
from primate.models import UserBase, UserMeta, BcryptMixin
from django.db import models
class CustomUser(BcryptMixin, UserBase):
__metaclass__ = UserMeta
Note that this will update all passwords on authorization success to use bcrypt.